Liberals & Conservatives More Alike Than You Think

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With media figureheads like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore
representing the right and left, it's no wonder conservatives and
liberals seem worlds apart. But the two sides of the political
spectrum are closer together than they believe, a new study
reveals.

Surprisingly, it's not just the other party that people get
wrong; they also tend to exaggerate the moral beliefs of their
own political affiliation.

"These moral stereotype differences were exaggerations beyond
even the most
extreme partisans we could find," study researcher Jesse
Graham, a psychologist at the University of Southern California,
told LiveScience.

Moral differences

Graham and his colleagues based their work on previous research
that has found real differences in the ways
liberals and conservatives view morals. Essentially, people
see morality through five different domains, these studies have
found. The first is harm/care, or concerns about treating people
with compassion and sympathy. The second is fairness/reciprocity,
which has to do with ideals about justice and rights.

Both conservatives and liberals care about these first two
domains, but liberals tend to put more emphasis on them than
conservatives. Meanwhile, the study found, the last three moral
areas are important to conservatives, and less so to liberals.
These three areas are all focused on group morality. The first is
ingroup/loyalty, which includes patriotic concerns and "us versus
them"-style arguments. The second is authority/respect, which
demands respect for tradition and social order. The final domain
is purity/sanctity, which includes such beliefs as "the body is a
temple" and similar religious purity concerns. [ 8
Ways Religion Impacts Your Life ]

Graham and his colleagues wanted to know if people correctly
judge that liberals care more about the first two domains while
conservatives base their morality more evenly on all five. They
also wanted to know whether stereotypes about liberal and
conservative beliefs would be exaggerated, and if so, who would
be the most accurate and who would be the most off-base.

Political stereotypes

To find out, the study researchers asked volunteers who visited
their research website, projectimplicit.org, to fill out surveys
on their own moral beliefs or to fill out the same surveys while
imagining that they were answering for the "typical liberal" or
"typical conservative." In all, 1,174 liberals, 538 political
moderates and 500 conservatives participated in the study.

The researchers then compared the answers with a real-life
national survey of actual liberal and conservative beliefs.

"People's moral stereotypes were even more polarized than the
actual differences between self-reported 'extreme' liberals and
'extreme' conservatives," Graham said.

What's more, everyone exaggerated in the same way. Liberals were
seen as caring only about harm/care and
fairness /reciprocity. Conservatives were seen as barely
caring about those moral domains at all, though their concerns
about loyalty, authority, respect and purity were overestimated.

People even exaggerated their own group's beliefs. Self-described
conservatives who filled out the survey as "typical
conservatives" were more likely to describe a "typical
conservative" as not caring about harm and fairness than an
extreme conservative was to describe him or herself. Liberals,
meanwhile, exaggerated "typical liberal" concern about those
issues.

"One of the takeaways of the study is that liberals and
conservatives actually share a lot more of their moral values
than anybody thinks," Graham said. Putting more emphasis on one
or two moral domains does not mean people don't care at all about
the rest, though that seems to be the misperception, he added.

Moderates exaggerated the liberal-conservative gap the least,
though they did exaggerate it, the researchers found. Moderate
conservatives were also relatively accurate, while the worst
exaggerators of the groups' differences were self-described
extreme liberals, Graham said.

The reason for this liberal exaggeration may be that
conservatives do emphasize all five moral domains, while the
group morality domains are fairly nonpressing to liberals. Thus,
Graham said, a liberal who hears a conservative arguing morality
on the basis of purity may assume that the conservative doesn't
care at all about harm or fairness. In fact, conservatives do
care about these things, Graham said, they just include other
morals, too.

The media may play a role in fomenting liberal conservative
stereotypes, Graham said, given that "the kinds of people who
argue with each other on Sunday morning talk shows" are
generally more extreme voices than the average Romney or Obama
voter. People may also exaggerate their own group's beliefs as a
way to differentiate themselves as unique political thinkers —
"No one wants to think of themselves as a 'typical liberal,'"
Graham said.

The researchers plan to follow up with more studies looking at
gender differences in morality and whether similar stereotyping
patterns are seen. In the meantime, Graham said the findings hold
a message for the politically passionate. [ 5
Ways to Talk Politics Without Shouting ]

"I don't think that any single scientific study is going to
magically make you get along with your conservative uncle or your
liberal aunt, but one of the messages here is that people aren't
as morally different as people across the political aisle as they
think," he said.